Hillary Clinton may have broken law by using personal email at State Dept.

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might have violated a federal law during her four years in office after conducting all of her state business using a private e-mail account instead of an official State Department domain.

What is a surprising is
that the State Department never bothered to create an account for
Clinton, The New York Times reported. Furthermore, her staff did not
abide by the Federal Records Act, which requires government
employees to preserve correspondence on departmental servers.
Letters and emails by federal officials are considered government
property and should thus remain in the public sphere, not private
emails, so they can be used in the National Archives.

Only two months ago, in response to a new State Department
federal record-keeping audit, Clinton’s advisers were forced to
analyze thousands of personal emails. How many emails were in
Clinton’s account is not clear, but as a result her aids turned
over some 55,000 pages of emails that were selectively submitted
to the authorities by her former staff.

According to Clinton's spokesman, Nick Merrill, the former First
Lady – and potential 2016 presidential candidate – defended her
use of a personal account, claiming the 67-year-old is complying
with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Merrill said that because the former secretary of state had been
corresponding with other State Department officials at their
government accounts, she had “every expectation they would be
retained.” Nothing was mentioned about her correspondence
with world leaders who do not use a state.gov account.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario – short of
nuclear winter – where an agency would be justified in allowing
its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email
communications channel for the conduct of government
business,” Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle &
Reath told NYT.